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Cerebral palsy care is daily, physical, and it does not pause.
Lifting, positioning, feeding, medications, therapy carryover, and the slow strain on a parent’s own body. Georgia Medicaid covers in-home help through the Georgia Pediatric Program.
How cerebral palsy is actually assessed for GAPP
The diagnosis by itself does not decide anything. What matters is how much hands-on care your child needs every day, and cerebral palsy spans an enormous range: some children need occasional support, others need total assistance with every transfer, feed, and position change around the clock.
Children with higher support needs, especially where there is a feeding tube, a seizure disorder, respiratory involvement or full dependence for transfers, are the ones most often authorized. That is the honest picture.
What a nurse actually does in the home
- Safe transfers and lifting, protecting your back as well as your child
- Positioning and repositioning schedules, and skin integrity checks
- Feeding support, including tube feeds where they are part of the plan
- Medication administration, timing and monitoring
- Seizure monitoring and response where that is part of the picture
- Carrying over what the PT, OT and speech therapists asked for between visits
Bring your child’s current IEP to the first conversation if they have one. GAPP will not pay for hours delivered at school, so hours get scheduled around the school day: mornings, evenings, overnights, weekends, holidays and summer.
The part nobody puts in a brochure
Parents of children with cerebral palsy are often doing two-person transfers alone, for years, and paying for it with their own spine. The strain is real and it is cumulative.
Bringing a nurse into the home is not an admission that you are failing. It is how you stay physically able to keep doing this.
Questions families ask
Does cerebral palsy qualify for GAPP?
It can, and often does at higher support levels, but the diagnosis alone is not the deciding factor. Georgia Medicaid looks at how much hands-on care your child needs each day. A child who needs full assistance with transfers, feeding and positioning presents a much stronger case than the diagnosis on its own.
Can we get help during the school day?
GAPP does not pay for hours delivered at school, because that overlaps with what the school is responsible for under an IEP. Hours are scheduled around school instead, including mornings, evenings, overnights, weekends and the whole summer.
My child is almost 21. What happens then?
GAPP runs to a child’s 21st birthday. Georgia’s NOW and COMP waivers are the long-term adult pathway and their waitlists run years, so the time to get on that list is well before your child ages out, not after.
Can I be paid to care for my own child?
Sometimes, through the Family Caregiver Option. A parent is hired as a W-2 employee of the agency and paid weekly for the child’s approved personal care support hours. Approval depends on age and care needs and is less common for very young children, and foster parents are not eligible.
Ready when you are.
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Check eligibility Call 678-459-2590HeartPath Home Care is an approved provider for the Georgia Pediatric Program. We are not a government agency, and this page is not medical advice. Georgia Medicaid decides who is approved, which services are authorized and how many hours. Talk to your child’s physician about your child’s care.